My self-summary

I don't define myself. I hate myself. If you ask me to define myself at gun point putting a gun to my head and tell me 'tell me, if you don't, I'll shoot you'. Then I would say 'I am a Hegelian Philosopher'. This is what interests me more than anything. The goal is Hegel, more than Lacan, more than Marx. We are just analyzing culture. It's over now. We need what we once called 'return to Metaphysical questions.' We need what we call 'Big Philosophy'. We need again to ask, 'what is this universe?', 'What is freedom?' and so on.

I opted for pure madness: the list contains only 'guilty pleasures', from two screen versions of Ayn Rand to a top Nazi melodrama, from David Lynch's greatest flop to height of musical kitsch, from a low-budget Hollywood action thriller to a Chinese big-budget historical spectacle, plus a half-forgotten Western and two marginal noirs. This is what I really enjoy - no compromises for high quality or good taste.

The six things I could never do without

ice cream without fat, Hegel, Hegel, Hegel, Hegel, Hegel

I spend a lot of time thinking about

reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The most private thing I'm willing to admit

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

You should message me if

According to this, the university of California is one of Obama's top five biggest donors. First, the entire UC system as a whole? What does "university of California" mean exactly? Second, a broke-ass public university system is one of Obama's top five donors? I suppose an Obama win would pay off in Pell grants but it still seems weird.

I don't want to mess w links because I'm in the car on my iPad on our way to Tulsa. I got to the story via electoral-vote.com. It's on the front page.

My mother, who's staying with us until power goes back on downtown, suggested we all go see Argo yesterday afternoon. I hadn't paid any attention to it before, but it really was very good -- suspenseful, not maddeningly anti-Iranian (that is, there was some reasonably honest backstory about the history leading up to the '79 revolution), and I enjoyed it a lot, particularly Alan Arkin and John Goodman as the Hollywood end of the CIA scheme. But I did spend most of the movie squinting at the hero, thinking "Huh, this is a big movie -- that should be an actor I recognize. Wonder who he is." And then the credits rolled and I found out that I can't recognize Ben Affleck with a beard.

Anyone want to pin down what's happening with the meetup tonight? I'm out, unless the lights come on downtown before midafternoon. But other people might want to make plans.

You know how there is excessive praise and lip-service for SAHMs as being the hardest, most rewarding job ever, and how that praise seems to deaden any meaningful conversation about how SAHMs are economically vulnerable and lacking significant societal support structures?

I think the same mechanism is operating with respect to soldiers. I can't think of another profession that gets quite the same valorization as soldiers and SAHMs, and yet they're both totally undercut when it comes to instituting anything meaningful to support them in recovering from their PTSD. Praise is much cheaper.

I predict that Hurricane Sandy will be the pivotal event that signals the beginning of the end for climate change denialists. Visually, it's got the most bizarre series of photos, compared to increased numbers of wildfires, for example. Second, hurricanes are linked in people's minds to Florida and warm weather, and it is bold and memorably bizarre for warm weather phenomenon to knock out the northeast like this. (Obviously hurricanes have hit this far north before, but this will strike people as something different.)

Second prediction: corporations will continue to successfully shut down all attempts to regulate carbon emissions or anything else that might address climate change. Even though everyone will agree that climate change is occurring. Liberal aneurysms will burst over the sheer insanity that we simultaneously believe climate change is occurring and yet refuse to do anything about it.

What will happen, though, is that FEMA gets shored up, because the most self-serving thing for every politician to do is make sure that they've got a competent response to tragedies when they occur.

Three nights ago I remembered something silly. When I was in college, I went on an archaeological dig in Cyprus during the summer between my junior and senior years. I never wanted to wake up until the last second for our early starts at the site, because I was always hungover, so I always missed breakfast. But that was OK, because my friend 'Stephanie' and I had special friends at the cafe before which our group met to get into the minivan that took us to the dig (one of two cafes in the village square; there were partisans.) These were a group of guys in their fifties to seventies who sat around all day drinking syrupy coffee and playing...dominoes? Not chess. When the clock spoke a certain hour they switched to ouzo or to the local "brandy," very like an artisanal lighter fluid. They didn't speak much English, but Stephanie and I would go in under the porch to where they were sitting in the shade and just say hi, ask how to say the names of things in Greek, and stuff like that. We were flirting with them in a generalized Southern girl way. Smiling always, and laughing when they said things that were not funny, and pretending to be put out of countenance rather than disgusted when they mustered up a crude sexual innuendo we could understand.

Stephanie was from West Virginia and was a real stunner: serious boobs, little waist, long brown hair and big blue eyes. OK, nice ass also. I, at the time (and this is why I never put this together until now) was very much trying to present as non-sexual. (But I was schizo about it.) I had a buzz cut, grown out into a tiny pixie cut, and black hipster glasses, which were, in the early 90s, actually hard to find. I usually wore combat boots. I did this in part I thought it might lower my level of street harassment, but it totally failed. Maybe it made things worse. Anyway of the 12 or so girls there we were the two cutest.

So, breakfast! Our guys brought us fruit, usually. Every day something different, like apricots from one man's orchard, or grapes from another. Sometimes bread, just a hunk cut from a loaf. And coffee--sweet, life-sustaining coffee! Often we didn't have time to chat, so we would just show up at the last minute, grab our peaches and coffee, and leave. I would offer some of my share to my roommate sometimes, but she never took me up on it. Let's face facts here: these dudes were handing out free, delicious food and coffee in a crowd of sleepy, hungover undergrads and grad students, but only to two people, and not enough to share. I was completely oblivious. I was being an asshole. Who do you all think was more annoyed, our female classmates or our male classmates? My male classmates were probably more mad that I had all my sexytimes with the cool graduate student, because who can compete with that? He was a graduate student (or rather, would be, starting in the fall--he was one year older than me.) That's hott.